


Birdsong

by montparnasse



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-02 02:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4041463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isabela, remembering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Birdsong

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a wonderful anon on tumblr, who asked for my thoughts about Isabela's reaction to Hawke's death; it sort of careened out of control and turned into this early on.

About a day’s sailing from Rialto or thereabouts, Isabela pushes her hair out of her eyes, which is salt-dry and tangled, and climbs into the crow’s nest at sunset, which is redder than blood spilled, and waits for the hang of the moon in the sky, which is a finger’s-breadth from full and glittering like a jewel right over the bright hum of the bay at dusk. Her crew is busy drinking, or else they’re out on the deck halfheartedly pretending to earn their keep with brooms and nets and rudder-repairs; the wind catches gently in the sails, pulling them slowly onward to safe harbor, and Isabela folds herself easily into the creaking of the timeworn wood, chin lifted to the stars, a compass in the forward stretch of her fingers reaching always for the murky prize of the horizon.

When the sea has swallowed the last of the midsummer warmth from the sky, she puts her feet up on the edge of the old heartwood and unlaces her boots, thinking idly of all the letters she needs to write on the shore as she closes her eyes to the night: a sudden draught like a breath at her neck that murmurs in the bells below, the ghost of a song she half-remembers, like an adagio whispered on the western winds from far, far away.

Somewhere in the night—impossibly close—a nightbird calls over the empty expanse of sea-dark, blindly, irrevocably. She looks and looks for it in the light of morning, but she never finds it.

—

The letter comes a month later, while she’s still docked for a few deliveries in Rialto. Varric doesn’t deliver it himself, because Varric is busy nurturing a budding conscience and a late-blooming sense of goodwill three countries and an ocean away, but she knows his pen-strokes nearly as well as she knows him, and she can tell by the tapering of his _y_ s and his _sorry sorry sorry_ s that his hands shook as he wrote it, and that, she thinks, means finality: the crisp folds of the parchment, the grief-shaken ink, bleeding black into the margins.

She feels shades of fourteen years old again, her worth weighed out in gold and silk on her mother’s kitchen table, a scrap of parchment like a beating heart in her hand: here is what was done to you. Now stand up, keep on living, make it work.

She reads it approximately fifteen times after she throws her whisky and her inkwell and all her jewelry at the wall, seven on the end of her rented bed, three at the window, twice on the floor, three at the desk where she leaves it unfolded, perfectly aligned with the edge, staring until the words buzz in the backs of her eye sockets and her own body seems to empty out and hollow, mistimed, everything senseless, unfocused. Beneath the covers, she lies on her back with all her clothes on and listens to herself swallow, feels her chest expanding and contracting with breath. The damp cold of her feet and her sweaty hands trembling on the sheets. The copper-thick taste in her mouth from where she realizes she’s bitten her cheek, the heavy curl of her spine against the mattress. Her heart moving blood, beating and beating and beating, _A-live, a-live, a-live_.

When she closes her eyes, the last of the firelight has left a glowing yellow-white spot aching like a knife behind her eyelids. It moves closer when she opens them.

—

On the way to Kirkwall, a week later, she dreams she’s in The Hanged Man.

They’ve taken the corner table between them all the way they used to, Fenris and Aveline and Varric and Merrill with a bowl of pomegranate seeds in the middle, Sebastian and Anders arguing with an almost friendly animosity, and Isabela comes down the stairs to take her regular seat that has not been her regular seat for more than a year, shuffling her cards, drinking the whisky that’s handed to her like this is five years ago and she hasn’t yet become ancient over the course of a single summer night spent shivering in the dark, and they are just friends again with gambling debts and bright eyes and bad decisions, growing in the openings of the crumbling brick and mortar.

She calls for another drink and shivers through her shoulders and her spine while the other people in the room—faceless, all of them—drift around the tavern floor like the shadows of myth, green-grey ghosts sifting voicelessly through the dream-air with their fingers curled as if in offering or supplication, watching her, like she could give them what they want with her own sluggish heartstrings and a handful of pomegranate seeds. Aveline says something she thinks is terribly funny, from the look about her mouth; Isabela tries to laugh and sounds like something dead, a dry stream, a hollowed-out tree.

Someone, suddenly, puts a hand on her shoulder, and it seems to take her hours to turn around and look: teeth glinting over the edge of a lip, eyes too blue and too young and too bright for her face.

“Boo,” says Hawke, and Isabela flinches on her bed like she’s been jerked backwards out of her own dreamspace, shaking, gasping until she cries, sick with the numb shock of loss that comes always with waking.

—

Kirkwall, after the collapse: scorched cobblestone and granite lining the streets of Hightown, afterimages of violence seared into the belly of the city where women and men and children shovel rubble back into the shape of something that could by stretch and generosity be called a neighborhood. Isabela stares up the marble steps to the Viscount’s Keep, the deadly asymmetry of the cracked rock catching in the back of her mind; for a moment, she thinks wildly that Hawke is going to come walking out of the great maple doors the way she has so many times before. Hawke is going to claw her way through Lowtown’s stagnant chaos, or Isabela will unravel the thread of time where she left and get their just before the end to stop it all, or she’ll swim across the Waking Sea, or she’ll tear open the spiderwebbed fabric of Isabela’s dreams one night and fall right out into bed beside her, and she’ll say, _Oh, Isabela, no. I’m so sorry, but you can’t have thought I’d ever really leave you, old girl. I’m not going anywhere, so cheer up, lovey, and maybe learn to bloody smile—we’re not dead, though your general behavior suggests otherwise. I love you. I love you so much._

It’s a fantasy she spins sometimes when she walks the ravaged streets in the evenings with nowhere to go, pretending not to notice the recognition she sees in Lowtown faces. It’s absurd, but the whole thing is absurd—Hawke dying, the illogical, impossible cruelty of not even having a body to burn so that hope still splinters in your heart despite the stupidity of it all, the shattering totality of her love coursing through her with no outlet and no direction for it to go. How does anyone—how could anyone possibly keep this all inside them, when she’s like a dam ready to burst? When she is almost furious with it and with herself, when she can barely breathe around it?

These streets have a certain taste and texture in her memory, crisp and bright as the star-sharp bits of sky showing through the cracks in the clouds: she remembers petty thievery on the docks at night, sneaking out of noblemen’s ships with a handful of gold or a new hat, the flaking red paint of Gamlen’s house and the stale beer and woodsmoke of Lowtown, the steel trellis outside Hawke’s smashed window in Hightown and the thorns that bit into her fingers when she climbed it one night, on a lark; there is still a tiny bump on her palm, just beneath her forefinger, where one of them never came out. She remembers most of all the jangle of her laughter, the tug of her hand, the way it felt when she knew Hawke was watching her, almost as solid as a touch. The sweetness of her mouth—always, somehow, a surprise—and the rush from their voices threading together, a sideways glance, an open-mouthed smile.

More than anything, she wants Hawke here even just once more so she can tell her all the things only she knows, how the flutter of laughter and lamplight late at night becomes a language to her, how everything knowable and unknowable in the entire world is contained in the flush of their skin and their feet peeking out together from beneath the covers. It whispers to her the same way Hawke’s smiles do, coaxed out of her with a look or a touch, speaks to her all the ways she thrilled in their silences and their words alike with love for her, for both of them.

She sits on the wooden slats leading down to the docks where the nighttime waves lap at her feet and tells Hawke all of this in her mind, where she imagines Hawke leaning into her and taking her hand like a vow until she kisses her wordlessly, understanding at last, and the sun and the sea break over them like home.

—

In a dream one night, accidentally asleep with her head propped up against the rigid back of one of Aveline’s chairs, she finds herself in an old attic room, a vaguely familiar place with recent footprints in the decades-settled dust. There is a door in the floor, its water-warped planks swollen and misshapen against the rest of the wood-grain, but it opens so completely when she pulls at it gently that Isabela thinks it must have been crafted for her years ago, just waiting for her to open it and crawl inside its womb.

Stair after stair leads her into the loamy, newborn green of what appears to be a forest, but on closer look she finds that it’s really a village so near to the mouth of the woods it’s as if the trees breathed it out themselves, all the straw-thatched barns, the cobbles of the bridge and the broken music of the churning windmill set on the hill like a treasure; this, she realizes, must be Lothering, before the ending of the world breathed fire down upon it.

“Well. Since you’re here, you might as well enjoy yourself,” says Hawke, and Isabela doesn’t have to turn around to know it’s her; she would know that voice in dreaming, in waking, in the very palm of death.

“You,” she breathes, turning to Hawke just as she throws an apple and hits her square in the shoulder. She doesn’t pick it up. “Are you—is this… real?”

Hawke picks up the apple for her, wiping it off on her blouse and putting it back in one hand as she takes the other, tugging her closer, closer. “Awfully metaphysical question, don’t you think? This is the Fade. Anything could be real, or unreal, or maybe reality’s just a thin, flimsy pair of knickers we use to make sense of things where order, in the first place, is an arbitrary concept we devised to make sense when sense doesn’t actually fit at all. Up is down is sideways, trees speak in the turning of the season.”

“Don’t be a twat. You know what I’m asking.”

“I’m a part of you, Isabela,” says Hawke, very softly. “You called me, and I came.” She reaches up to brush Isabela’s hair back behind her left ear and kisses the tip of her nose, smiles so sweetly that Isabela almost believes they are young again and whole, and for once in their lives or their un-lives, the universe is going to give back what it took from them.

“But you really shouldn’t be here.”

“There’s so much,” she gasps against Hawke’s mouth, because Hawke is kissing her now, both of them braced tight against each other, “there’s so much I never knew I wanted to tell you, but then you were gone, you were—you were _gone_ and I love you more than anything in the world. And it’s like a stupid bloody itch I can’t scratch in public because everyone will know I’m insane and Aveline will get that constipated look on her face and you know I can’t be ruining my reputation over you more than I already have, don’t you.”

A clamor of birdwings sounds from somewhere in the meadow, and then a song, a staccato breath, the faded lines of a poem she has always, always known. Isabela opens her hands and lets the apple fall, disintegrated to mealy seeds now, and touches Hawke mindlessly, voraciously, filling herself with all she can take while Hawke whispers reverently into her neck. “Time,” she says, inexplicably, and, “I love you. I love you, always. Please don’t think I’ll ever stop.”

Snow starts to fall from the wide open sky, and she has just enough time to hear the forest sigh as she palms Hawke’s face, burning the sharpness of her nose and her coalstone hair and the amused arch of her brows into her belly like a starving prisoner before she wakes with empty hands, her fingers pressing hard into the skin of her own arms. She watches the half-moon marks of her fingernails bloom out in red and holds very still, so as not to disturb the echoes of Hawke murmuring across her body.

—

For two weeks she stays with Merrill, who opens her battered door to her late one night as if she’d been expecting her all along and says, “Da’len, oh—I was just making tea,” and shares her bed with Isabela, who sleeps fitfully with her head pressed to the wall, back to back and hip to hip with Merrill, where both of them pretend not to notice when the other wakes up clammy with fear in the night and say nothing of just how much older than themselves they are, and have always had to be.

She meets new arrivals to Lowtown—elves, mostly—and even signs a few of them on as crew for when she next takes ship, a few months from now. Merrill is up with the sun every morning, and there is almost always something cooking when Isabela wakes up, even though she knows Merrill cannot afford much at all. Some days, she even eats all of it.

Early one morning, Isabela stumbles into the matchbox-sized sitting room-slash-kitchen and finds a warm coffee cake sitting on the table with a slightly waterlogged book and a small red flower growing in a clay pot. Merrill, poking the fire with a sword in lieu of an actual poker, says, “Happy birthday! Oh, you didn’t think I’d forget, did you? Only, it’s funnier if you thought I would.”

Isabela, in fact, had herself forgotten her own birthday; she’s not sure that this even _is_ her birthday or if it’s another lie she told long ago, another story she made up until the words blurred and she believed it. “Kitten—oh, thank you,” she says, “you’re so sweet I could have you for dessert _and_ come back for seconds,” and it feels ridiculous and wrong in her mouth, but Merrill smiles anyway, which means she’s done something right, though what it is she can’t say.

“The book—it’s, well, I’ve had it for a while, actually,” she says by way of explanation when Isabela picks it up. “After—well, everything—there was a lot of rioting, and looting, but I suppose no one wanted Hawke’s books, or maybe just not the dirty things, because it was still there, and I thought—I mean, I thought you might. Want it.”

Slowly, she turns the cover and then the first pages, recognizing immediately the Orlesian filth Hawke used to spout, in that exact sparkling intonation Isabela can hear suddenly with such clarity it shakes her to the bone and she is sobbing carelessly with the jolt of love in her heart and all the thousand, thousand ways you lose people: over afternoon tea, in the bath, the secret joke you kept between you, tripping over the shoes they leave in the doorway, buying food, coming home, the dog-eared pages of their books, a pair of stockings with no feet to fill them. The indentations in the sheets on their side of the bed. The shitty poetry no one else has ever read in just their voice, with just that laugh in their throat. The thorn stuck, forever, in your palm.

“I’m at least,” she gasps wetly against Merrill’s thin shoulder, “I’m at least a little happy, you know, even though I look like a bloody rotten _melon_ , so don’t think I’m such a miserable shit.”

“Isabela,” says Merrill, clutching at the back of her head. “Oh, da’len, I’m here. I’m here,” she says again and again, high with pain. The walls of the house creak gently in the wind, whispering, whispering.

—

Returning to her dream attic at night, she finds new doors waiting for her every time she thinks to look: one in the wall, another hidden in the ceiling so that she has to grab the single dusty stool and hoist her way up, three lined up in a row on the floorboards. Once, she opens one where the window usually is and climbs through.

They take her back to Lothering sometimes, Denerim, Ostwick, Antiva City, Kirkwall the night before she left, where she unmakes her own decisions and watches the night play out again five different times in rapid succession: twice, it doesn’t matter whether she gives the stupid book back or not, and there is blood; in one, the qunari sail away peacefully, and Viscount Dumar—kind, foolish man—bestows her with a title; another time, she takes the book and smothers her love, and never comes back; in another still, she is honest with Hawke from the start, and it’s all over quickly, seamlessly, and they both wind up in Nevarra, making a go of life so far away from it all.

“Don’t know why you ever mucked about with me,” she tells Hawke one balmy afternoon, or maybe evening. The stars are out, but it’s bright as stark daylight here in the grass, the cottage behind them pouring chimney smoke into the air. “You were always cleaning up my messes, and where’s the fun in that, hmm? None of the pleasure and all of the pain.”

“I rather think I had quite a lot of pleasure, thanks,” says Hawke, laughing and pulling her fingers through Isabela’s hair so that she arches into it. “And everyone else made messes, besides. Me included, as I recall, and I do! How many times did you have to help me out of my trousers, eh? Eh? That’s what I thought.”

“You know what I mean,” she says, guilt worrying at her belly like cold stones. The scene changes: a bridge now, teetering on endless fenland and bursting with heather. Isabela gets up and sits beneath it with her feet dangling into the rushing water and stares at the smooth pebbles beneath the surface and has a strange sense of belonging, as if the land is cradling her in the crook of its elbow; when she squints into the sun, she can see another cottage, this one larger, and a city an hour’s walk to the south. “What _are_ these places?” she asks, though Hawke has never given her an answer before. Her favorite was the last one: a ship slightly newer and larger than the one she’s had for a few years now, Hawke’s clothes folded beside hers in the chest in the captain’s cabin, just where they belong. Someone has thrown a girl’s doll into the stream, her button eyes hanging by threads; Isabela picks her up, wrings her out.

“Might-have-beens, I suppose,” says Hawke, in that softly assured way that tells Isabela there is nothing to suppose about it. “Anyway. I fell in love with you for all your good parts, of which there are many and I am a bloody _connoisseur_ , and all your bad parts, altogether.”

“You do know how to cheer a body up, sweet thing.”

“Don’t I just,” says Hawke, and bends to kiss her, abruptly, urgently. “Isabela. You’re going to get stuck in this place and you’ll never find your way back. You have to stop coming here.”

“I don’t want to,” she whispers, “why doesn’t anyone ever ask me what I want?” Hawke turns over and doesn’t move, and it strikes her, as the sun slices in at her cut-glass angles, just how much she looks like an effigy in marble-white; Isabela grabs her by the shoulder and rolls her over again, and she’s breathing like Isabela is breathing, smiling like Isabela is smiling, her sad, old eyes. “I see how it is: I finally stop running and you’re telling me to go again. Well, tough luck, old girl, but I’m not going anywhere.”

Hawke’s face pinches inward, a frown between her eyebrows betrayed by the trembling of her lips when Isabela reaches for her again, pressing their foreheads together until Hawke is all she sees, wrapping her arms around her, fiercely, not wanting to let go, not wanting both of them to be put to rest just yet. “Isabela, you can’t—”

Something has torn open the grey canvas of the sky, and the world rushes in, and Isabela, breathing in, loses her to the dawn.

—

Eventually, Alistair visits her at Merrill’s house, late on one autumn-bruised afternoon. He brings her a bag or Orlesian oranges and perches in Merrill’s sitting room-slash-kitchen while Merrill herself hovers protectively over the stove, pretending to peel potatoes, and they talk about Ferelden, and the weather, and Orlais, and he does a lot of apologizing and a lot of blinking and a lot of staring at Merrill’s loose, dusty floorboards.

“She was,” he says, and Isabela hears him swallow. “She was a, an amazing woman, and she always talked so much about you and I’m just—you have no idea. How sorry I am.” He looks at the floor and tries, she can tell, to get his rigid muscles to relax.

Isabela watches his hands, his fingers working uselessly, breathing in, and in, and in, the pull of his muscles and his skin alive as worms, feeling the nausea rise from the hard knot of pain in her belly into her throat, and it all seems so stupid, that he should breathe and sleep and eat and grow grey hairs when Hawke will not, but she tries not to be angry with him for it. 

She knows, probably, he’s not here for her so much as he’s here for the same pitiful reassurances we all seek after the damage is done: it isn’t your fault. I don’t blame you. There is nothing you could have said or done that would have made the slightest difference at all. Go on, then, and look alive.

He doesn’t want to hear what she really knows, that absolution—seek it where you may—only ever comes from yourself, once you find the kindness within your own heart to let yourself have it and take hold; he doesn’t want to hear that it doesn’t matter where in the world you go or what your compass tells you, that there is only ever one direction we move in and everything else is illusion. It’s up to you to steer.

Instead, she takes his hand suddenly, and says, “Listen.”

At the counter, she can hear Merrill peeling potatoes, the knife coursing smoothly over their grainy flesh. The sound of an accordion in the street below, playing for coppers. A hammering echoing off the stucco walls, the music of rebuilding. A group of women, laughing. Children running with growing feet along the broken cobbles, a vendor packing up his wares for the day. A bluebird singing grief-sweet on a fencerow, almost a laugh, and the wind in the wires stretching between the rooftops, murmuring an evening crescendo in the chimes, and her own heart moving blood, beating and beating and beating, _A-live, a-live, a-live_.

Alistair’s breath hitches, and he squeezes her hand tight; it is a pale, impoverished gesture, and it is one of the most beautiful, miraculous, precious things she has ever been given.

—

Nights she spends equally now between her ship in the harbor and Merrill’s house, where she helps with dinner sometimes and starts plotting out her course for the next expedition—Antiva, again. Sometimes, Aveline stays for wine and dessert; sometimes, Merrill touches Isabela’s face the way she’s started doing so often lately, and Isabela wonders, briefly, what it might be like to reach her hand out at night and find her heart beating beneath it.

Before bed, no matter where she is, she unties the red scarf from her arm and folds it on her nightstand, to be wound and rewound every morning like ritual, like the solidity of love.

—

In a dream, she is lying down in a pasture with grass tickling the shells of her ears and hollyhocks that twinkles like bells, or maybe stars; they nod to her when she asks them if this is the right place, and she knows, strangely, that it is, because there is a sea here, too, a violent wash of color beneath an exquisite sunset with ships suspended like toys on the surface of the waves, rising and falling, dreaming and waking. She is struck by just how much the give of the earth feels like a mattress and the mattress feels like the entire universe, stuffed with down and softened by her body as she turns in its palm to find Hawke lying on her side, smiling at her with her cornflower eyes and her pale mouth, taking her hand and letting Isabela pull their tangled fingers to her lips.

“I suppose you think that makes you look _romantic_ ,” says Isabela, glancing down at her blouse, which is entirely undone at the top.

“I think it makes me look positively edible. Judging from that ravenous look on your delicate features, I’d say I’m somewhere in the ‘delectable’ realm right now.”

“Keep at it and maybe someday you’ll work your way up ‘devastating,’ but, well. We can’t all be me,” she says, sticking her chest out and tugging gently on one of the ties beneath her breasts until it comes loose. Hawke laughs and laughs.

“You’re an arse, you know I hate it when you do that. Unfair advantage,” she scoffs, with all the false outrage she can muster through her smile. “Some of us don’t have quite as much stuffing in our pastry puffs.”

“You remember that conversation we had about saying what you mean so you sound less embarrassing, Hawke? Say it. Go on. _Flatter_ me.”

A long sigh, a clenching of the teeth belying the grin. “Fine. Some of us don’t have tits as big as coconuts that make us look like seaside goddesses in everything we wear. Or don’t wear.”

Isabela grabs her by the elbows and drags her over and into her, leaving her laughter behind her ear. “Nutter,” she says. “Completely barking. Lucky for you, I love you for it.”

Hawke shifts up her body until she’s got a knee on either side of Isabela’s hips and both hands cradling her face like something young and whole, bending down until their lips brush and their noses press together, Hawke’s freckles blurring into her freckles. “You beautiful thing,” she whispers into Isabela’s mouth so she can taste the words, “look at what you do to me.”

“There’s still so much,” says Isabela, breaking off when Hawke unfastens the last of the clasps keeping her clothed and then arches up to let her slip the smallclothes down her legs. “There’s so much I’ve always wanted to tell you, and I’m always going to be thinking of things—you know how I am—and you won’t be there.”

“No,” Hawke agrees. The tendons in her neck shift beneath Isabela’s mouth as she pushes her blouse off, the same salty-rosy taste Hawke has always had to her, familiar and soothing. “But couldn’t you tell me anyway?”

The sea breathes grey above the hollyhocks and the bluebells, the stars billowing on the north wind and into Hawke’s eyes. “Yes,” Isabela whispers, “yes, Hawke, I can.”

This, she knows, will be the last time she ever sees Hawke, or this permutation of Hawke as she remembers her, with her oldyoung cornflower eyes and her sad fingers, her bright bird voice; this is the last time she will ever come here and see the stars through the cracks in the clouds and the sky blazing with the crescent moon; this is the last time Hawke will ever stumble into her minefield of innuendo on purpose and laugh all the louder for it; this is the last time they will ever make love, here in the bed of their pasture; this is the last time she will ever fall asleep beside Hawke, the last time she will hold the irregular curl of her neck in her hand, the last time she will feel her lungs swelling and deflating against hers, marking no time but their own.

She pulls Hawke into her with hands scarred strong, wrapping her arms around her back and stroking up and down the laddered notches of her spine as she drags her between her legs, tastes summertime humidity on her lips when they kiss with their eyes open, partially because Isabela doesn’t want to lose the sight of her and partially because she could not stop looking at her now even if she wanted, her skin on Hawke’s skin, their shared uneven breath, the curious beauty of both of them knotted together on the grass. Hawke rocks a thigh up against her grindingly-hard and she thrusts her hips to meet it, trailing her fingers over the disharmonies of her body only Isabela knows: the scar on her hip from when they had too much dessert wine and she caught the bad side of a wardrobe, the spot on her neck and chest worn white under the sun where she keeps her mother’s old necklace beneath her armor, the ears inexpertly pierced by Isabela herself in front of a winter fire when the hoarfrost glittered on the windowpanes at the turn of the new year. She takes one of them into her mouth and tastes metal and sweat and heat.

They both laugh and then gasp, whisperingly, at the slide of their bodies arching and interlaced, Hawke angling herself downwards to stroke her palms heavily over the backs of Isabela’s thighs, hooking them behind her knees and tugging her forward until she winds them around Hawke’s waist, shivering under the tongue dipping into her navel and Hawke’s finger swiping over her clit while the sweet rush of it makes the wires of her body quake and jangle. 

“Isabela,” Hawke whispers, her voice reverberating against the skin between her breasts where her mouth is right above her heart, water into wine. “I love you. All of you.”

“You don’t—oh—you don’t have to say it,” she breathes. “I know. I know I’ll never stop.” Hawke’s nose brushes against a nipple when she shifts down again, the fingers stroking over her clit so arrhythmic her hips jerk up to match the strange breathless grace of it just when Hawke leans in and presses both fingers inside, her tongue flicking long and honey-slow over her clit, the other hand braced on Isabela’s thigh painting nonsense into her skin. 

Hawke flattens her tongue out against her and then snaps it down _hard_ , smoothing her lips around Isabela’s clit and stroking her fingers as if she still isn’t deep enough inside her, as if she never will be, but then Isabela comes silver-hot like a surprise when Hawke crooks her fingers suddenly, the sweet rush dissolving in her belly, half-sobbing, half-panting out the words that have come undone in her throat. Her thighs and her belly slide sweat-slick against Hawke when she pulls her up again, and all it takes to get her there are a few strokes of Isabela’s fingers into the wet spot between her legs while she moves her hips, murmuring into Isabela’s neck and surging up against her.

For the rest of the night they lie together under the prickly light of the stars, wrapped in a peculiar blanket woven from dandelions and rosebuds and soothed by the dim lull of the sea. Isabela curls into her so their bodies twine together like bindweed, running her fingers through Hawke’s damp hair and rubbing her fingers along the scars they named for each other—Gertrude and Harold and Sister Petrice and Hawke’s Great Cock-Up II—until their ribs hurt with laughter and the crescent moon, which had previously filled to the brim, begins to empty and wane.

“When I wake up, you won’t be there,” says Isabela. Hawke smiles at her, moon-bright and more beautiful than anything Isabela has ever known.

“Doesn’t mean you can’t keep me,” says Hawke, “however you want.”

This is the last thing Isabela sees: Hawke’s eyes watching her in the moondark and their fingers threaded through in their own private poetry, the thing that is love and life and the entirety of the universe contained in their feet peeking out together from beneath the covers, and the sea burning into the sky as the shadow-ships pick up their anchors to sail for morning.

—

It’s impossible to say what the Fade really is, what truly lies behind the brittle veil between the living and the dreaming. If you could take it between your fingers and peel it back like sugar glass until the barrier dissolves, you might find a thousand lives waiting to be stepped into like old shoes, or maybe just one—your own—frozen in perpetual, cyclical orbit, where you are condemned to make and remake every mistake and every breath and every trembling first touch and every jealousy and every promise and every word. Maybe there is an eternity of contentment spent exactly where you stand, fixed, like a moth pinned in a case. Maybe it is just what it seems: a dream, an illusion, a story people tell in the dark when there’s really nothing to be found there at all but an immaculate emptiness, signifying nothing. Time immemorial. Life recorded like the rings of a tree, grown over with ivy.

Isabela has never known what she believes, if she believes anything much other than pagan preachers and accidental, drunken prophets in the back alleys of the world—she doesn’t—but she does like to believe she’ll spend life on her feet the way her life was meant to be spent: that she’ll sail off a thousand times more to places she’s been and places she hasn’t, that she’ll tell stories and cheat at cards and sing and steal and win and lose and send Aveline scads of filthy Antivan romances and reach for Merrill in the night and go arthritic and crinkle-eyed. She wants to wander the ends of the earth dancing and drinking and screwing, and she wants to come back to the shore and learn herself again and fall in love and beg forgiveness, and she wants to sit on the wooden slats of the docks and look out at the big Kirkwall sky and tell Hawke all of these things, always, and remember the weight of her shoulders and the stirring of her fingers. She wants to imagine there is a world where Hawke can hear her; she wants to imagine that she will finally stop to rest someday, and Isabela will find her again, strange, beautiful wanderer, and they will give themselves over entirely, endlessly.

Sometimes still, in her dreams, she’ll catch the angular jut of an old shadow or eyes like cut-glass and a bird will laugh knowingly at her out of the clouds, watching from a devoted distance in the dark. She doesn’t follow, but she can never bring herself to wish it away.

—

Leaning over the very bow of her ship at the full moon, held high on the road of the western winds halfway to Kirkwall: a sudden draft creaking through the planks and down the deck to the bells strung at the foot of the mainsail, a high, tuneless breath, a mad octave like the ghost of laughter on a familiar face, a bright gust of melody as soft as a touch.

Isabela turns to look at the prickly starlight hanging over the hum of the sea, and smiles.


End file.
